Where Troubled Kids Can Be Kids

The scene is played out in households everywhere: The school day ends and the kids race for the video game controls. Homework can wait.

It's no different for Mashon and the other boys at Solace Place who sat hypnotized on a recent afternoon by the flashing lights and electronic explosions of Sega Genesis.

"Aren't we supposed to get our allowance today?" Mashon asked, and the others began a chorus of "Yeah, aren't we?"

Down the hall, some boys studied in their rooms while others danced to music from somebody's boombox.

Unremarkable, except that the kids in this household are former drug dealers, gangbangers, child abusers and some of the city's most traumatized youngsters, "the worst of the worst," said one official.

But they haven't been treated like children. And that, officials at Solace Place say, may do more to turn them around than the harshest penalties society has tried on them.

At the converted convent in the turbulent Englewood neighborhood, the boys learn about life from buying properties on the Monopoly game board and from practicing slam dunks in a gym that was once a chapel.

Funded by state and private funds, Solace Place, unlike most facilities for troubled youths, is unlocked. And though a few kids have run away, most seem to realize that they have more freedom inside than out, the freedom to take life at a gentle, orderly pace and learn to think in ways that will keep them from being locked up when they return to the streets.

Therapist Bernie Richard says of his charges, "They have been very poorly wired by their environment, and it's our job to rewire them."

Solace is a last resort, and if the kids don't make it there, "their problems are so chronic that they'll go to a hospital or be locked up," says director John Douglas II.

One of only three such facilities in Illinois, the 3-year-old home for 14 boys is run by St. Joseph Carondelet Child Center in the buildings of the former Our Lady of Solace parish, in the 6200 block of South Sangamon Street.

The program's unorthodox, Cosby family approach has made it a rare standout in a child-welfare system plagued by violence, overcrowding, runaways and financial turmoil.

James Thompson, a child welfare supervisor with the state's Department of Children and Family Services, said about 85 to 90 percent of the children at Solace Place move on to increasingly independent living arrangements and, eventually, out of the system. The statewide average for such facilities is only about 50 percent, he said.

"They're one of the most successful programs in the state," Thompson said. "They're very intensified in how they deal with kids."

"They don't shy away from difficult children. Their feeling is that any youth referred to them can be successful," he said.

When they arrive at Solace most of the kids are highly mistrustful. "The child can't understand why he's not being beaten or why he's not being abused," says assistant director Robert Longo.

"It's amazing when you see a child come into an environment that you and I would consider to be a fairly normal, fairly stable environment. To them, that's a dysfunctional environment."

Almost all the boys suffer symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. They're "going through a fantastic internal struggle," says Richard.

"Their bodies have been impacted, traumatized, hurt by the bombardment, literally physical and verbal from the environment-unfortunately it started with family members," he says.

Mashon was an orphan at 10. Soon he was rolling with his gang and almost inevitably was arrested for selling drugs-3.5 kilograms of cocaine.

"I got by my case and I felt that since I got by, I could go out and do it again and get by it again," he says.

He started dealing again and ended up in St. Charles Juvenile Correctional Facility.

Next came countless group homes and shelters for boys.

"I was thinking real stupid," he says of those days.

Then, three years ago, he found Solace.

"I decided while I was in jail, that there has to be a point where you need to stop and think," he says. "Think of something to get through to get yourself out of these situtions."

Richard says the biological aspects of the boys' pervasive stress disorder can be seen in their wariness of physical contact.

"There were guys when they came here, you couldn't get near them. Now, through playing, through . . . acting out that isn't painful, they're starting to touch, they're starting to hug a little bit," he says.

The youths are responsible for such chores as taking out the trash and straightening their rooms. They're given a weekly allowance and sent to their rooms as punishment.

In the morning, most go to classes in the basement of the facility (a few of them are enrolled in public schools). In the afternoon, they have time for arts and crafts, video games or board games.